Who goes into the garden to bag up an enormous mound of soil and ends up getting covered in honey?
Me. Of course.
How does this stuff even happen? I think I can trace back to the only possible explanation for how this occurred (more on that in a second), but why does this stuff happen to me?
Sometimes I think that I have a superpower for meeting interesting people and getting into conversations and friendships with them. Other times I’m convinced I’m just a magnet for the improbable – in all forms.
On this occasion, having dug up the entire lawn last year to replace it, and having apparently got a bit overenthusiastic with my first bit of digging, I was left with a veritable mountain of soil (intermixed with wayward grass) on what was the patio.
“Get a man in” said a friend. “Get two men in, they’ll clear it all and take it away for you” he said. “But I could just dig it into bags myself, couldn’t I?” I said, entirely miscalculating just how many bags that would actually take.
I began with ten bags – filled them without a problem, but without making much of a dent on the mound. Day two I came back proudly wielding 20 more bags “that should do the trick” I thought. I bet you can guess the rest…
The bit you wouldn’t have guessed – and to be fair, neither did I – was that during my digging I would strike a lidded bucket. The sharp spade cracking through its brittle plastic in an instant, and then thick golden goo started to pour out.
“Oil?” I thought, but there is no reason I would have oil in a bucket in the garden, I looked closer.
As someone who grew up with a beekeeper, and the yearly harvesting of honey from the hives turning the kitchen into a sweet-smelling sticky extraction centre, I have a good idea of the look and texture of honey.
“It couldn’t be” I thought, poking my finger in and smelling the substance (still oozing from the broken side of the bucket).. and yet… “what else could it be?”. I poked my tongue out and dabbed a little on the end. Sweetness. Unmistakable sweetness.
But how was there a bucket of honey in the garden? And how had I not discovered this before?
The latter question I cannot answer, but mum was a beekeeper, and for whatever reason, it appears she stored a bucket of honey in the garden. The thing is, she’s been dead for nearing 15 years, could I have really missed this for so long?
I have no idea, but that’s the only explanation I can come up with, and as Sherlock Holmes says “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
In attempting to move said broken bucket I ended up streaked in honey, thus leading me to the initial question, and a pondering about whether totally random stuff happens to me more frequently than the average person. It certainly feels that way sometimes.
Anyway, what is one meant to do with a bucket of garden-aged honey? Asking for a friend…
RadioKate 